“Other things, too,” she said, “aren’t as bad as they seem. Or maybe they’re worse, but not in the same way. I know you know I’m not paying for the things I have here. You’ve known that because I’ve told you to be careful about phoning me, and all the rest. But you think I’m some one’s mistress. You’ve never said it, but I know you’ve thought it all along, ever since the night you first set foot in here. Then get this: I’m not being kept by one man — I’m being kept by a clique. I’m not being kept because I’m loved — I’m being kept because I’m useful. I can’t tell you any more than that. It isn’t good if I talk. Bad for me, maybe bad for you too.”
“Tell me you love me. That’s all that matters, not who your friends are or what you’ve done.”
We were sitting now on the divan in one another’s arms, where one night I had found her handkerchief when I came in here alone, and where the other night that taffeta cushion had lain with the print of some one’s heels bitten into it. “Wade,” she said, “you complete the circle for me; by loving you, I’ve come around again to where I started from. Eight or nine years ago I used to go with a boy like you — you know, a boy who really loved me; it was only when I’d had the opportunity of comparing him to those that came later that I realized he must have been a pretty decent sort after all. Oh, he wouldn’t have been healthy for a good girl to know — and yet when I told him I’d been drugged and kept locked up in a roadhouse overnight, he went out and got blind from wood alcohol. Since then I’ve been dragged through cage after cage of gorillas, and now once more I’m with some one who loves me. It seems so strange to hear those words ‘I love you’ and know they’re really meant, really mine.”
“They’re no good,” I said, “how can they tell you what I really want to say?”
“It’s funny, it can’t be explained,” she murmured, “I feel sometimes as though you were sent my way to remind me now that it’s too late; as though someone were shaking a finger at me and saying, ‘See what you’ve missed, Bernice!’ Oh, it’s not you so much, honey, it’s what you stand for in my mind; there’s really nothing to you, you’re just a man no different from a dozen, from a thousand, others — like that song that goes, ‘Along came Bill, you’d see him on the street and never notice him at all.’ But you love me for myself, that’s what counts — and you’re honest and you’re not too cruel. The kind of girls that get your kind wouldn’t understand me; they’d say. ‘Who wants Bill? The world is full of Bills’; they’re looking for romance, the saps, for sheiks and mysterious strangers. Wade, darling, I’ve had a man die in my arms — I’ve had to pretend to dance back to my table when I knew I was holding a corpse in my arms, so that people would think he was just drunk — with the blood coming out of the little holes where the bullets went in and soaking into my dress in spots the size of dimes. Maybe that’s romance; to me it was just obeying instructions. They can have it; I want what you stand for. I want to take up your ways and drop my own. And it’s just a little too late, I guess.”
So the Plan was born then, as we sat there, and we talked it over ever so indefinitely at first, just skirmishing around the edges, afraid it would rise up and vanish like a mirage if we dared to look it too closely in the face. We were like two people bending over a pool of water and seeing our dreams in there, afraid to breathe on it for fear of causing a ripple. And what we said was set to the key of “If I had a million dollars” or “If I were the mayor of New York”; in other words, as though we both knew it could never be, but as though there were no harm in plotting and planning it just the same. Children often play that game: “If you could have just three wishes, what would they be?”
“—And if the worst came to the worst,” Bernice said, “Lord knows, I’d have enough money to tide us over the first few months until you could find the right kind of job—”
“Oh, no,” I said virtuously, “I wouldn’t let you do that; whatever you have, you’d put away for yourself.”
She drew her legs deliciously up under her and suddenly went down a notch or two lower on my arm. One additional little squirm of supreme comfort, and the game went on. “Let’s see, now! I’ve got some rings and things in a safe-deposit box downtown — I haven’t looked at it in years. I really ought to go down one of these days and find out just what’s in it — I bet I could get enough on them to chip in with you on a car, some kind of a little Chevy, say.”
“I’ve got a compound-interest account in a bank over in Brooklyn, it must come pretty close to three hundred by now. That would be so much to the good—”
“Wait a minute, don’t interrupt,” she said absorbedly, “I’m trying to remember things. Then there’s that wristwatch with the platinum-and-diamond case — if I were going to do something like that with you, the first thing I’d do would be to get rid of all that junk; cold cash always is the handiest after all.” She looked up over her head, and said, “Oh, God, I feel so happy this afternoon!”
I took her open hand and smeared it over my face. “Why don’t we do it, Bernice? Why don’t we do it? If it goes wrong, you could always take up again where you left off.”
“No,” she turned to me and said, “that’s one of the main reasons why it’s so out of the question. There’d be a lot more to it than just — changing over, if you want to call it that. To begin with, I’d have to get right out of New York. And I’d have to do it like that!” And she smacked her palms together and threw one arm up and the other down, like a person playing the cymbals. “I couldn’t stay on here a minute once I did anything like that. Well, to speak quite plainly to you, Wade, I’d have to duck — and stay under cover for weeks, and maybe months.”
“Why?” I said. “This is a big city.”
“I’ve seen what happens too often,” she assured me. “You wouldn’t get me to stay here. Or come back within two years, either!”
“Well, okay, then we’d quit New York; it’s not the only town in the country—”
“Believe me, we’d have to,” she said doggedly, “it’d be either that or the observation ward at Bellevue for me; I wouldn’t want to have kittens every time the doorbell rang while you were out.”
“Ah, honey, that sounds sweet,” I grinned. “One roof, four walls, and you and me!”
“And to be like other people are,” she said, “and love each other, and to read the morning papers for the weather and the style hints and not — not for anything else. I’d give anything if a thing like that could only come true.”
“It can,” I said, “I tell you it can! Other people have made their lives to be what they want them to be. Why can’t we? We’re as good as any one else, and maybe a whole lot better; we’ve got that much coming to us at least! Ah, darling, don’t back out; ah, honey, say it can be done.”
She turned and flung her arms around me, and hid her face upon my shoulder. “It can’t be done, Wade, can’t be done!”
“Only because you don’t want to; only because you don’t think so!”
“It’s not for me,” she said. “Funny how you can go ahead as far as you like, but you can’t take a step backward — ever."